Black Cat Weekly #4

THE HAMMERING MAN by Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg-3

“Is there a drink in this? I ain’t had a drink since breakfast!” said another who pushed up to the table and bared his blue-veined forearm for Trant to fasten the instrument to it.

Young Winton Edwards, watching as curiously as the others, saw Trant fasten the sphygmograph on the mechanic’s arm. and the pencil point commence to trace on the sooty surface a wavy line, the normal record of the mechanic’s pulse.

“You see it!” Trant pointed out to the others the record, as it unwound slowly from the drum. “Every thought you have, every feeling, every sensation—taste, touch, smell—changes the beating of your heart and shows upon this little record. I could show through that whether you had a secret you were trying to conceal, as readily as I will show the effect whisky has on you, or as I can learn whether this man likes the smell of onion.” He took from the free lunch on the bar a slice of onion, which he held under the man’s nose. “Ah! You don’t like onion! But the whisky will make you forget its smell, I suspect.”

As the odor of the whisky reached the man’s nostrils, the record line—which when he smelled the onion had become suddenly flattened with elevations nearer together, as the pulse beat weakly but more quickly—began to return to the shape it bad had at first. He tossed off the liquor, rolling it upon his tongue, and all saw the record regain its first appearance; then, as the stimulant began to take effect, the pencil point lifted higher at each rise and the elevations became farther apart. They stared and laughed.

“Whisky effects you about normally, I should say.” Trant began to unfasten the sphygmograph from the man’s wrist. “I have heard it said that black-haired men, like you, feel its effect least of all; light-haired men more; men with red hair like mine feel the greatest effect, it’s said. We red-haired men have to be careful with whisky.”

“Hey! There’s a red-headed man,” one of the crowd cried suddenly, pointing. “Try it on him.”

Two enthusiasts at once broke from the group and rushed eagerly to Meyan. He had continued, inattentive through all, to read his newspaper, but now he laid it down. Trant and young Edwards, as he rose and slouched half curiously toward them, could see plainly for the first time his strongly boned, coarsely powerful face, and heavy-lidded eyes, and the grossly muscular strength of his big-framed body.

“Pah! your watered whisky,” he jeered in a strangely thick and heavy voice, when the test had been explained to him. “I am used to stronger drinks!” He grinned derisively at the surrounding faces, kicked a chair up to the table, and sat down. Trant glanced toward Edwards, and Edwards moved silently back from the group and disappeared unnoticed through the partition door. Then the psychologist swiftly adjusted the sphygmograph upon the outstretched arm and watched intently an instant until the pencil point had caught up the strong and even pulse which set it rising and falling in perfect rhythm.

As he turned to the bar for the whisky, the rear door slammed and the voice Trant was expecting spoke: “Yes, it was at Warsaw the police took him. He was taken without warning from his friend’s house. What next? The prisons are full, but they keep on filling them; the graveyards will be full next!”

“Look! Look!” cried the Lithuanian beside Trant at the table, “he bragged about watered whisky, but just the sight of it makes his heart beat bigger and stronger!”

Trant bent eagerly over the smoked paper, watching the stronger, slower pulse beat which the record showed.

“Yes; before he takes the whisky his pulse is strengthened,” Trant answered; “for that is how the pulse acts when a man is pleased and exults!”

He waited now, almost inattentively, while Meyan drank the whisky and the others grew silent in defeat as the giant’s pulse, true to his boast, showed almost no variation under the fiery liquor.

“Fall, such child foolishness!” Meyan, with steady hand, set the glass back on the table. Then, as Trant unclasped the straps around his arm, he rose, yawned in their faces, and lounged out of the place.

The psychologist turned to meet young Edwards as he hurried in, and together they went out to join the father at the motor.

“We can do nothing sooner than tonight,” Trant said shortly, an expression of keen anxiety on his face. “I must learn more about this man, but my inquiries must be conducted alone. If you will meet me here again at seven o’clock tonight, say at the pawnbroker’s shop we passed upon the corner, I hope to be able to solve the mystery of the hammering man, and the influence he is undoubtedly exerting on Miss Silber. I may say,” he added, after a moment, “that I would not attach too much weight to the child’s statement that Miss Silber is Meyan’s wife. It is understood, then, that you will meet me here tonight, as I have suggested.”

He nodded to his clients, and ran to catch a passing street car.

CHAPTER IV

WITH NERVES OF STEEL

Promptly at seven o’clock, in accordance with Trant’s directions, young Winton Edwards and his father entered the pawnshop and started negotiations for a loan. Almost immediately after they arrived there, Trant joined them, still carrying in his hand his instrument case. The boy and his father closed their negotiations and went out with Trant into the street. They saw then, to their surprise, that the psychologist was not alone. Two men were awaiting them, each of whom carried a case like Trant’s. The elder of the two, a man between fifty and sixty years old, met young Edwards’ stare with a benignant glance of his pale blue eyes through an immense pair of gold spectacles. The other was young, pale, broad-browed, with an intelligent face, and his gaze was fixed in a look of dreamy contemplation. They were dressed as mechanics, but their general appearance was not that of workmen.

The door of Meyan’s lodging house was opened to them by the landlady. She led the way to the second floor, but paused to show a room to Trant.

“That is Meyan’s room,” Trant explained. “We will wait for him over here.” He followed the woman into a small and stuffy bedroom on the other side of the hall. “We had better not speak while we are waiting and—we had better wait in the dark.”

In the strange, stuffy, darkened little room the five sat in silence. Footsteps passed often in the street outside, and twice some one went through the hall. A half hour they waited thus. Then a heavier footstep warned them of Meyan’s coming. A minute later, the front door opened again and admitted—as Trant felt from the effect of the first tone which reached the man waiting at his side—Eva Silber. After several minutes Trant turned up the light and motioned to the two strangers who had come with him. They immediately rose and left the room.

“I am going to submit you both to a very trying ordeal,” Trant said to his clients, in a tone so low it could not reach the hallway, “and it will require great self-control on your part. Within five, or I hope at most ten, minutes I am going to show you into Meyan’s room, where you will find, among other persons, Meyan himself and Miss Silber. I want you to promise that neither of you will attempt to question or to speak to Miss Silber until I give you leave. Otherwise I cannot allow you to go in there, and I have my own reasons for wanting you to be present.”

“If it is essential, Mr. Trant—” the elder Edwards said.

Trant looked at the young man, who nodded.

“Thank you,” said the psychologist; and he went out and closed the door upon them.

Fully a quarter of an hour had passed, in spite of Trant’s promise to summon them in ten minutes, before the psychologist again opened the door and ushered them into the room they already knew as Meyan’s.

The long table in the center of the room had been cleared, and behind it three men sat in a row. Two of these were the strangers who had come with Trant, and the cases they had carried, together with the one Trant himself had brought, stood open under the table. The man who sat between these two was Meyan. Near the table stood Miss Silber.

At sight of her, Winton Edwards made one swift step forward before he recollected the promise he had made, and checked himself. Eva Silber had grown pale as death. She stood now with small hands clenched tight against her breast, staring into the face of the young American she loved. Trant closed the door and locked it.

“We can begin now, I think,” he said.

He stooped at once over the instrument cases and brought out from them three folding screens, about eighteen inches square when extended, which he set on the table—one in front of each of the three men. At the bottom of each screen was a circular hole just large enough for a man’s arm to go through; and at Trant’s command the men put their arms through them. Stooping again swiftly over the instrument cases, Trant took out three sphygmographs.

He rapidly adjusted these on the arms of the three men, and set in motion the revolving drums, against which the pencil points traced their wavy lines on smoked paper. His clients, leaning forward in their interest, could then understand the purpose of the screens, which were designed to hide the pitilessly exact records from the three men.

For several minutes Trant allowed the instruments to run quietly, until the men had recovered from the nervousness caused by the beginning of the test.

“I am going to ask Miss Silber to tell you now, as briefly as she can,” he said, after a pause, “the circumstances of her father’s connection with the Russian revolution which brought him to the state you have seen, and the reasons why she has left you to go with this man to Russia.”

“To Russia?” broke from Winton Edwards.

“To Russia, yes!” The girl’s pale cheeks glowed. “You have seen my father, what he is, what they have made of him, and you did not know he was a Russian? You have seen him as he is! Let me tell you—you, who wear proudly the badge of your revolution fought in seven short years by your great-grandfathers—what my father was!

“Before I was born—it was in the year 1887—my father was a student in Moscow. He had married my mother the year before. The czar, finding that even the teachings he had been advised to permit made people dangerous, closed the universities. Father and his fellow students protested. They were imprisoned; and they kept my father, who had led the protest, so long that I was three years old before he saw his home again!

“But suffering and prison could not frighten him! In Zurich, before he went to Moscow, he had been trained for a doctor. And seeing how powerless the protest of the students had been, he determined to go among the people. So he made himself a medical missionary to the poorest, the most oppressed, the most miserable; and wherever he was called to carry a cure for disease, he carried, too, a word of hope, of courage, of protest, a cry for freedom!

“Late one night, in a terrible snowstorm,” she went on, “just twenty years ago, a peasant brought to our door a note, unsigned for the sake of safety, it seemed, telling father that an escaped political prisoner was dying of exposure and starvation in a hut on a deserted farm ten miles from the town. My father hurried to his horse and set out, with food and fagots, and by morning, through the cold and deep snow, he reached the place.